What I'm Thinking About

Monthly Archives: December 2002

A worker who commands the kingly salary of $12,000 a year pays just 4 percent of his income in taxes. That tax burden, the editors conceded, “ain’t peanuts” — but it’s too small for that worker to feel any “rage” toward his wasteful government.

“Who are these lucky duckies?” the editors asked.

The editorial was widely ridiculed as an example of ideological stubbornness gone disastrously, hilariously overboard. “One of the things that has fascinated me about The Wall Street Journal editorial page is its occasional capacity to rise above the routine moral callousness of hack conservative punditry and attain a level of exquisite depravity normally reserved for villains in James Bond movies,” wrote Jonathan Chait in The New Republic.

Snow may yet prove a brilliant treasury secretary. After all, the skills required are as much diplomatic and bureaucratic as they are managerial. But his elevation to the high-profile post, and the appointment of a stand-out like Donaldson to a second-tier position like the SEC, show the relative ascendancy of the access capitalists in the Bush administration and in the Republican Party generally. That may be why the markets regard the recent appointments as one step forward, two steps back.

shakes head in disgust
This is sad, we have a President who promotes mediocrity higher than excellence. But really, who can blame him? When you are dim, you don’t wan’t to stand to close to a bright light, or people will see you for what you are.

Share this:

BTW, for people who think the woman’s movement started in the 60s, check out The Women, a movie made in the best movie year ever, 1939. Norma Shearer gives a speech to her mother about how things were different, back when women were considered chattel. Now they’re equal to men, says Shearer’s character. While a feminist could make a reasonable argument that the movie is sexist, it also carries the feminist message, strongly, in the 30s, way way before I was told (when I was a kid) that it existed. Women of my mother’s generation (she was seven when the movie was made) said the same thing Shearer said, quite a few years later. The data is out there, feminism was brewing for a while if only in Hollywood.

Woman’s sufferage certainly went beyond Hollywood. And don’t forget, prohibition was driven by a seemingly strange alliance between puritan prudes and feminists who were sick of women getting beaten and impoverished by their drunkard husbands.